Although we are way past the shortest day (on the Winter Solstice) it is still dark in a morning although lighter in an evening. It's 8AM now and coming light but we will soon be implementing daylight saving again (slightly pointless in a 24/7 society) and will be back to even darker mornings.
This is another post that I started a couple of days ago and then have picked up to finish today. The weather has been dreich although last night we had snow again which you can see on my Instagram channel here.
I have been doing a work course in Power BI yesterday and today so not much time to listen to music, but yesterday I picked out a free copy of "True" by Spandau Ballet and wasn't too impressed , but luckily it's only thirty six minutes. "Lifeline" is good , but the rest is dross although the title track was successfully integrated into the excellent "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" by PM Dawn.
Anyway the song I am going to share is the excellent "Keep It Dark" by fourth phase Genesis from "Abacab" which I believe was titled after it's chord sequence and is one of the many great songs they produced after Peter Gabriel left.
The other week I just did not feel like walking at all, although I managed a few steps , last week I did get back to sort of normal although th eclocks going back has had an effect. Last night I went out in daylight at around 4:30pm , when I returned around 5:30pm I was in total darkness, the dark came nown very quickly and although the weather is cold it's not freezing.
When I go I out I do enjoy trying to capture pictures, especially the skies , simethimes you don't get what you want, but sometimes you get things far more amazing than what you have actually seen. This morning the sky was a gorgeous pink with mackerel cloud effects , but the pictures I took were grey and nondescript. This week I have taken some amazing looking sunrise pictures , and they were nowhere near as good as the photographs that I took.
The thing is I remember photography being film based , you took the picture , then when you finished the film you paid to have it developed and a week or two later you got the results which may or may not be in focus. Now thanks to enormous jumps in technology we have cameras as part of our communication devices and ofthen these allow us almost instant access to take pictures.
The other thing is that if you don't take pictures immediately then the moment is gone, that was never an option with film based cameras.
Another thing is that often see vistas which I want to take a picture of , but the camera cannot capture the faraway image sthat I see like a plane or a bird. The other thing is that the human eye only captures part of what we see and the brain fills in the gaps.
With a phone camera we don't have an optical zoom, so we need a a very high pixel capture to enable the digital zoom , which works to a point, but still is nowhere near as good as the human eye or cameras with optical zoom (which have enabled me to capture images that I couldn't actually see when I took the photograph),
I once had a Sony phone and the camera on that could take some amazingly psychedelic images, which I sort of loved , but was not good fir capturing a normal picture. Apparently my Google Pixel 2XL is one of the best phone cameras, and the number of photographs I take are a testament to that, but I know things are only going to get better in this area.
The word "Camera" appears in a wonderful line in the John Cooper Clarke song / poem "Post War Glamour Girl" and is:
"Glamourous Cameras Clickety Click"
I always thought "Glamourous Cameras" would be a great name for a band as well. So that is the song we will go with on this dreary Thursday.
I vaguely knew that the the clocks changed this weekend but I wasn't sure if they went forward or back. So I thought I would look it up on that internet thing and it would tell me. Well it told me what daylight saving was but not what to do with the clocks. Eventually I did find the information I wanted but that's the problem with search engines , you need to be in tune with how it searches and be exact in what you state what you are looking for.
For the first time in my life I've realised that this is actually a twenty five hour day, and although my clocks say it's nine o'clock we have have ten hours so far today. Also most digital devices update themselves so you you know what time it is but you have to manually changes your unconnected devices , so that's my watches that still work , three clocks and the cooker which I reset yesterday.
I remember, many years back, getting through to Monday and not realising the the clocks should have been changed. I remember Catweazle being surprised that we let ourselves be effectively ruled by an alarm clock. When I searched Catweazle on Amazon one of the first thigs that came back was "Whips and Exorcists!" (see below) , god knows why, though the normal search is free of such things.
The twenty five hour day concept reminds me of "The Eighty Minute Hour" short story by Brian Aldiss where the powers that be control all timepieces and slow them down when you work and speed them up when you are doing things that you want. Does that sound like real life?
So the song I've gone with is "Hard Times" by the Human League , great minimalist eighties synth that mutates into it's original source "Love Action"
I was thinking of using "Milkshake" by Kelis for this #Oktoberfest sequence post but then remembered "Milk" by Garbage which I feel is a bit classier if less poppy. Both Milk and Milkshake are drinks though not alcoholic, but I suppose you could always ad your own choice of alcohol , imagine a Baileys Milkshake , now that would be very nice.
Anyway why Clocks.? I woke about 5 O' Clock and went to check if my Google Pixel had charged (though I think it's started losing charge faster) but anyway the time said 4:05 . I thought bloody hell it's losing time. Then I remembered that it was sometime around now that the clocks go back.
Because almost all TV is watched on demand , news papers are seldom taken , and even TV news is seldom watched I had received not a single prompt to put the clocks back. However now that all our electronic connected devices are programmed to reset when they need to we can almost ignore clock resetting (although all my watches and analogue timepieces do need resetting.
If you think about this "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss could become reality and we wouldn't even know because we tend to trust our electronic devices, the number of times I've left my watch at home so use my phone to check the time is very high.
The concept of "The Eighty Minute Hour" is that the controllers slow clocks down during working hours and speed them up out of work, and it so often feels like that is our reality.
It's eleven o'clock Saturday Night, although you could say it's really midnight as the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving rubbish, I've been out with Maureen and Scott and Fiona and eaten some of the best burgers in Newcastle at Meat Stack at The Dog and Parrot, then tonight eaten at Rajnagar for the first time (had lots of takeaways) but had one of my best Indian meals ever (and that was everyone's opinion) , although one has to wonder what happens when you get used to perfection.
The thing is I am now feeling wide awake. Obviously the sugar from that excellent food has obviously stimulated me to whatever. Everyone else was asleep two hours ago after watching an episode of Timewasters and Black Books, both class comedy, if you click on the links you should be able to watch for free.
So I thought I'd just do this post, which is really just a diary entry to remember what I have done today , I think I have managed to put all the analogue clocks and watched forward, and I suppose an appropriate record to share would be Bryan Ferry's "This is Tomorrow" because it sort of is, all my analogue timepieces say it's Sunday but all my digital timepieces say it's Saturday. So I will see you tomorrow, or is it today? Who know?
Chose the title from a brilliant Sparks and Giorgio Moroder collaboration from their album Number One Song In Heaven. In our fantastic digital age all of the clock resetting is done for us apart from the odd analogue device (like my Beuchat and iToc watches, wall clocks, heating clock) plus the digital cooker clock and the wall timer for the living room main light.
Many years ago I went a whole day without realising the clocks had changed, luckily I switched on the TV in the evening , thought there's something very amiss here, then realised what had actually happened.
Today sounds and looks very windy and I'm not looking forward to the fact that it's going to be darker an hour earlier but that's just the nature of the beast. I'm not sure daylight saving actually saves anything much anymore in the 24/7 world that we live in, although in a bit of good news Fiona's friend Tim informed me he'd heard a new Half Man Half Biscuit album, "Urge For Offal" on Spotify so that is about to be ordered when I've posted this. I I listen to it on Spotify the band will probably get paid about 0.0001p per track. The mega selling Daft Punk album Random Access Memory resulted in a payment of £13K from Spotify which might have paid the tea bill!
I've nothing against the Spotify model , but it's pay per play model just doesn't work in favour of the artist. Apparently Spotify plays have generate me 1p in the last 12 months on a piece I did for the artist Rebecca Cother for the slideshow below, but I didn't do it to make money , just to see how easy it was to do.
Oh another good thing is that Preston's Joe Garnerweighed in with hat trick to give us victory against Fleetwood Town yesterday and put us second in the table, so it's an excuse to include THAT goal:
Anyway I hope you enjoyed your extra hour in bed and enjoy the rest of the day.
